This post is written as part of AOL Money & Finance's Best & Worst of 2006. Vote for Barry Diller, or to check out the other overpaid CEOs.

I'm sorry, but I so totally win. What I mean to say is, Barry Diller so totally wins. He is the undisputed worldwide best freakin' ever King of the Overpaid!

There are many reasons someone might see fit to award their company's CEO a Whole Lot of Money. Perhaps that CEO oversaw a banner year for the company, with record profits and growth in sales and maybe the launch of a whole new enterprise. Maybe that CEO got named as Most Powerful this or Most Influential that. Maybe the CEO played less golf than any other CEO in the whole U.S. of A. Maybe -- this company might award its CEO, say, $10 or $20 million in salary and bonuses and another $20 or $40 million in stock compensation. I mean, that would be a lot of money for a job well done, right?

Ha ha. Hahahaha. HAHAHAHAHA! That's Barry Diller laughing at you. Because in one year, as CEO of IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ:IACI), during which by all accounts his company did a whole lotta nothing, he made: $295 million.

More than four times the next-most-highly-paid CEO for 2005. That doesn't even count the stock options from Expedia, Inc. (NASDAQ:EXPE), which he spun off during the year, which by one calculation has Diller clocking in at nearly $500 million.

What does IAC/InterActive do? Mostly, it owns the Home Shopping Network, with lots of other little properties like Match.com, Ticketmaster, Evite, Citysearch, and LendingTree. Actually these are mostly really great companies but I think for pay like this Diller should at the very least be hosting the overnight cubic zirconia and Bedazzler marathon on HSN once a week.

Color me surprised. Along with the rest of the investing world, I was happily wandering around, lulled to contentness by the belief that the highest-paid CEO was the nice, boring Eugene Isenberg of Nabor Industries Ltd. (NYSE:NBR). And why wouldn't I believe it?

Well, mostly, because it's not true. IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ:IACI), you see, filed the proxy indicating its CEO's pay later than most companies. And the end result? IAC CEO Barry Diller blows poor Eugene out of the water. Eugene? $71.4 million (that's a lot Eugene! congrats!) Barry on the other hand:

$295. Million. Dollars.

What did Barry Diller do for this money (which was mostly stock options)? Well, during 2005, the year covered by the executive pay survey, his company spun off Expedia, Inc. (NASDAQ:EXPE), the online travel site, which was -- I suppose -- a useful thing (although the spin-off's stock is down 30% this year). Stock in IACI declined during 2005, 7%, and while operating income improved by almost four times in 2005, it was still a quite-modest $868.2 million.

And, as this article points out: if you add in stock options from Expedia, Barry Diller pulled in $469.7 million.

I think we can slice and dice the numbers however we like, but none of us are ever going to believe that he's worth that much. The Home Shopping Network is a fascinating slice of Americana, a weird, wacky and wild-eyed universe in which Midwestern grandmas discuss their impending purchases of lawn ornaments and appliqued baby sweaters with highly made-up wannabe "Personalities." An unqualified Wall Street success it's not, and I, for one, vow never to buy anything from HSN again.

That doesn't mean I won't watch the scrapbooking marathon ...

I want, oh so deeply, to be shocked. But I'm not. Here's the thing: women are powerful! Women are amazing! Women are reaching the upper echelons of corporate America! Hurray! And while I'm sure everyone at NOW threw a soda party when Indra Nooyi took over as CEO of PepsiCo, Inc. (NYSE:PEP), I'm sure they also tried to get mad about today's "news": male executives make way more than female executives. And then I imagine they remembered: this is nothing new. This is nothing surprising.

Women have been making less than men since the dawn of time. And although Oprah and Indra and Meg are so darned powerful, they can hardly sway the enormity of gender history in a few decades of exerting their collective feminine force.

Let's try one reason female CEOs, CFOs and the like make pocket change compared to their male brethren (and no, there seems to be no relation between executive pay and corporate profit, sales, stock performance, or how many pageviews your bio on the corporate homepage got this year): there just aren't as many of them. Naturally that doesn't explain why (for instance) the top-paid female executive, Safra Catz -- president and CFO Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ:ORCL) -- made a sad 36% of what the top-paid male executive made (that's Eugene Isenberg, CEO of Nabors Industries Ltd. (NYSE:NBR), for the record). Catz wasn't even the highest-paid executive at her own company, pulling in about half of what founder and CEO Larry Ellison scored.

Well. That is Larry Ellison after all. His ego has to be worth at least as much as three women executives put together.

Google continues to demonstrate its particular brand of goofy-yet-financially sound thinking, as the company indicated in a proxy filing yesterday. CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page will collect $1 in salary for 2006, just as they did for 2005. According to the filing, "Their primary compensation continues to come from returns on their ownership stakes in Google. As significant stockholders, their personal wealth is tied directly to sustained stock price appreciation and performance, which provides direct alignment with stockholder interests."

(On a multiples basis, however, they might have the highest bonuses anywhere; Brin was paid $1,723 in bonus, with Schmidt and Page collecting a tidy $1,630, over 1600 times their annual salaries!)

Google also announced that the company intends to forgo dividends to its shareholders "in the foreseeable future."